The key to today's Gospel is not some binary opposition between institutional and "Gospel" religion. The most important factor is the human heart. Jesus quotes the prophet Isaiah: 'This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me'" (Mk 7: 6) and later adds: "For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come." (Mk 7: 21) The heart is the centre of the person. It is there that God speaks to us and from there we respond. The Italians say that "the habit does not make the monk." Our prayer and other religious practices are fruitless if our hearts are not engaged and we are not acting out of love. A number of times I have had occasion to counsel people about their marriages and the conclusion I arrived at was that in order to endure in the relationship that the person needed to act not out of duty but from love. It is love that transforms the heart and makes us able to live according to the Gospel and bear the fruit of the virtues: "If I speak in the tongues of mortals or of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing." (1 Cor 13: 1-3)
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